Skinner's Room: 2021

Thursday, 30 December 2021

Nostalgie de la boue

"nostalgia for mud" is the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements.

Marion Woodman the Jungian considered that a break or katabasis from the normal social world could leave the protagonist trapped by "a yearning for what I call pig consciousness - wallowing in mud and loving it".

Rainer Maria Rilke left his body on December 29, 1926.

excerpt from the First Elegy:

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,

to give up customs one barely had time to learn,

not to see roses and other promising Things

in terms of a human future; no longer to be

what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave

even one's own first name behind, forgetting it

as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.

Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange

to see meanings that clung together once,

floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work

and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel

a trace of eternity. -- Though the living are wrong to believe

in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.

Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among,

or the dead. The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever,

and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

Trs. Stephen Mitchell

ORIGINAL GERMAN EXCERPT:

Freilich ist es nicht seltsam,

die Erde nicht mehr zu bewohnen,

kaum erlernte Gebräuche nicht mehr zu üben,

Rosen, und andern eigens versprechenden Dingen

nicht die Bedeutung menschlicher Zukunft zu geben;

das, was man war in unendlich ängstlichen Händen,

nicht mehr zu sein, und selbst den eigenen Namen

wegzulassen wie ein zerbrochenes Spielzeug.

Seltsam, die Wünsche nicht weiter zu wünschen. Seltsam,

alles, was sich bezog, so lose im Raum

flattern zu sehen. Und das Totsein ist mühsam

und voller Nachholn, dass man allmählich ein wenig

Ewigkeit spürt. – Aber Lebendige machen

alle den Fehler, dass sie zu stark unterscheiden.

Engel (sagt man) wüßten oft nicht, ob sie unter

Lebenden gehn oder Toten. Die ewige Strömung

reißt durch beide Bereiche alle Alter

immer mit sich und übertönt sie in beiden.

Schließlich brauchen sie uns nicht mehr, die Frü

Monday, 29 November 2021

leaf

… the constant motion in the leaves rendering his landscapes confused and unmeaning… [T]he same objection necessarily applies to all moving objects, which can never be properly delineated without the aid of memory'. Only after it had fallen to the ground was a leaf available for impression, when it rejoined the world of inert things.

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion p44 commenting on Daguerre's experiments.